Internet Explorer Best Browser at Blocking Malware, says Report

Among the five major Web browsers, Internet Explorer 9 is the most effective at stopping socially-engineered malware, according to a recent report from NSS Labs.

Looking at IE9, Mozilla Firefox 4, Google (News - Alert) Chrome 12, Opera 11, and Apple’s Safari 5, NSS Labs found that Microsoft’s (News - Alert) latest browser version by far surpassed its rivals in the number of malware threats that it was able to thwart.

Overall, IE9 caught 99.2 percent of the live phishing threats thrown at it in NSS Labs’ testing. IE detected such a huge number thanks to its SmartScreen filter. Introduced in Internet Explorer 8, SmartScreen detects phishing Web sites designed to trick people into installing malicious software, known as socially-engineered malware. The SmartScreen feature in IE9 combines URL Reputation, which was introduced in IE8, with Application Reputation, which is new to IE9, to beef up overall security.

“IE9 with SmartScreen offers the best protection of any browser against socially engineered malware,” said NSS Labs in its report.

In contrast, the other major browsers were able to capture only a small percentage of threats.

Google Chrome was second on the list, detecting 13.2 percent of the live threats, but a healthy improvement over NSS Labs’ 2010 third-quarter test when Chrome caught only 3 percent of malware. NSS noted that the improvement stems from an enhancement to Chrome’s SafeBrowsing feature, which “now warns you before downloading some types of malicious files.”

Tying for third place were Apple Safari and Mozilla (News - Alert) Firefox 4, each of which trapped 7.6 percent of the live threats. But Firefox’s effectiveness actually showed a drop from the 2010 tests when it managed to catch 19 percent of the threats.

Last on the list was Opera, which detected only 6.1 of the malware threats included in the testing.

NSS also found that IE9 was the speediest browser at detecting malware, followed by Safari 5, Firefox 4, Chrome 12, and Opera 11.

To conduct its tests, NSS pointed each of the browsers at a series of pre-screened malicious Web sites. From an initial list of 5,000 suspicious sites, the company narrowed it down to 3,296 potentially-malicious URLs. Removing sites that didn’t pass its validation criteria, NSS eventually included 1,188 URLs as part of its testing.

NSS Labs ran its tests for a period of 14 days, from May 27 through June 10, 2011. Throughout that period, NSS performed 5 different tests every six hours on each of the five browsers.

Assuming the validity of the tests, and I have no reason not to, this backs up my belief that IE, especially IE9, is still the best browser for the business world. Though rival browsers such as Firefox and Chrome have grown more popular and grabbed more market share the past couple of years, with each new update Internet Explorer remains an effective and reliable product for both individuals and enterprises.

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